Mary Jean Chan

What My Diary Might Look Like

The same uniform for twelve years. A white skirt, blue collar, blue belt, blue hem. A dark, no-nonsense kind of blue. White the color of snowfall in Eden. You washed it every single day, made sure you ate in small bites, always wore an extra pad so none of the blood could seep through. You began wearing that uniform at age six, your skin haunted by the British flag, so you could be Chinese with English characteristics. Every time you wore it, you shut your body up. Some girls wore theirs short, discolored, tight. As Head Girl, you reported these girls for inappropriate behavior, kept your own dress at just the right length. Most mornings, you see the face of a boy in the mirror. You expect to fall in love with him, someday. Meanwhile, your fingers brush the wrist of another girl as you jostle into the assembly hall, and you understand that sin was never meant to be easy, only sweet. What might light up the pond you sat beside in dreams, eyeing skin and so much depth it would be years before you dared? What curvature of tongue might you taste, as if another’s breath were blessing? One night, you find yourself back there. You dream. A voice says: Hell is not other people. You sink, stripped of the glowing dress you wore for thousands of days.

On Losing Face So the Body Comes Back

This is what it looks like: picture
a Chinese girl and a dinner table.
The girl will wait until she is told
she can sit at the last seat available,

after the men and the boys, after
the elderly. She does not think it
wrong, this box-step of worries
she has learnt since she was old

enough to kneel whenever she lost
her cool, faltered in her smile. She
knows codes, taps them out on her
tongue: t-h-a-n-k y-o-u. S-o-r-r-y.

When the girl was six, she wanted
to be a boy. A storm of dresses fell
from her mother’s lips. The sky was
the color of whitened knuckles. The

girl became a dress, found herself
marooned at the edge of her bed –
mannequin beauty ready to drown.
In a dream, the dinner table is an ark

she has finally abandoned. The girl
dreams that the words sprouting like
weeds from her mouth are not weeds,
but magnolias – her mother’s favorite.

Mary Jean Chanwon the 2016 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL), placed Third in the 2016 Bare Fiction Prize for Poetry, and has been shortlisted for the 2016 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2016 Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition, and the 2016 Resurgence Eco-Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in The Poetry Review, Bare Fiction Magazine, The London Magazine, Ambit, Callaloo Journal and The Rialto. As a Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry, Mary Jean is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her article ‘Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen’ is forthcoming in 2017 from The Journal of American Studies.